San Diego County Board of Supervisors Honors Ken

Ken’s son Gus Krueger wrote, “I did receive a certificate and a transcription of the adjournment that the San Diego County Board of Supervisors did in his [Ken’s] honor back in December. If you’d like to add that to the tribute site, I’d be happy to scan it and send it along. Although the adjournment isn’t entirely perfect (he didn’t own the distributorships, he just managed them) it was still incredibly thoughtful.”

And here are the aforementioned adjournment certificate and text:

(Click to view a full-sized image.)

San Diego County Board of Supervisors Adjournment Honoring Ken Krueger

Greg Cox

SUPERVISOR, FIRST DISTRICT

San Diego County Board of Supervisors

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

ADJOURNMENT IN MEMORY OF

Ken Krueger

I would like to adjourn today’s meeting in honor of Ken Krueger, a former resident of Ocean Beach and a co-founder of San Diego’s famous Comic-Con convention. He passed away on November 21st at the age of 83.

Mr. Krueger was born in upstate New York but eventually moved to San Diego where he opened a bookstore in Ocean Beach. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Alert Books was a hangout for science fiction fans and it was the place where Mr. Krueger met Sheldon Dorf, a recent San Diego transplant who had run a pop culture convention in Detroit.

Mr. Krueger and Mr. Dorf began planning a comic book convention for San Diego with their friends and since Mr. Krueger was considered the “grown-up” of the group, he served as the first chairman of the event that would come to be known as Comic-Con. He would serve on the organization’s board of directors during its critical early years.

In addition to owning his book store, Mr. Krueger also ran a small press publishing company that printed the early works of award-winning science fiction and comic book writers. He also owned comic book distributorships in Illinois and Los Angeles. Mr. Krueger later moved back to upstate New York, but this year, he returned for the 40th annual Comic-Con to be honored as one of the founding fathers.

Mr. Krueger is survived by sons, Timothy “Gus” Krueger; Peter Krueger and Kenneth Krueger Jr. and by his daughters, Kathy Austin; Deb Pangrazi; Judy Hemmerling; Linda Hinds and Karen Barone. From its roots in an Ocean Beach book store, Comic-Con has grown into one of San Diego’s signature events and Ken Krueger was there at the beginning. We are grateful for his vision and will remember him fondly.